To Start a War: How The Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq by Robert Draper

Review by Jonathan Selling

The Short 

In To Start a War, author Robert Draper dives into the debate within the Bush administration of  whether to go to war against Iraq in 2003. He shows how a once fringe idea was pushed onto the agenda and overcame objections; even as the emerging “War on Terror” dominated American foreign policy.

The Long 

The origins of the Iraq war have always been fuzzy: did the United States go to war to topple Saddam, because of WMDs, to liberate the country, or to stop terrorists? In this fascinating dive into the debate over war, Draper shows how all these beliefs and a failure of intelligence resulted in the War in Iraq. He shows how the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, inserted the idea of war into the Bush administration’s discussions and dominated the conversation; resulting in the silencing of opposition to war. By exclaiming that Iraq must have weapons of mass destruction and demanding that the CIA get intelligence on these weapons, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were able to “bully” the CIA into line; even as experts doubted these weapons’ existence.

Draper gives an excellent overview of the Iraq Hawks’ mindset and their reasoning for suspicion of Saddam Hussein. Hussein had tried to hide chemical weapons in the aftermath of the Gulf War, mainly as an insurance policy against Iran. This deception was quickly discovered, but the knowledge that Saddam had lied before became reason enough to suspect that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction, even as evidence points in the opposite direction. Once 9/11 happened, fear of these non-existent weapons prompted a new appraisal of Iraq’s posed threat. While these arguments may seem absurd to those reading in 2020, Draper emphasizes how real they were to those in the Bush administration, and how central they were to the justification for war.

At the center of this is Bush himself, presented as a timeline-obsessed chief executive with deep trust in his subordinates. Bush also had an aversion to getting directly involved, which prevents him from effectively interrogating the calls for war. Ultimately, Bush comes across as playing a bit in the planning of the war, reacting to his subordinates’ ideas on Iraq, rather than dictating them himself. One is left with the impression that Bush, who campaigned on a promise of a lesser focus on foreign policy, was led to war just as much as the nation.

To read or not to read? 

To Start a War presents a fascinating look at internal fights within the Bush administration. To many, even those who lived through it, the decision to go to war in 2003 is not clear. Draper’s book shows the complex deliberations that went into the decision. Draper’s book also shows the importance of lower level individuals and bureaucratic competition in a nation’s decision making process; an important lesson for anyone interested in international affairs.

While Draper’s conclusions are not as exciting as those put forth in popular culture, they are deeper and more consequential to practitioners of foreign policy. To anyone involved in foreign policy, To Start a War is a tragic lesson in how an idealistic foreign policy can go awry.